Social Media Value Chain - Snake oil and Strategy

Good summary post from Adam Tinworth, on 5 lessons from London Social Media Week (my abridgements, see Adam's post and rather good liveblogs for the full monty):

1. This is just beginning

A common theme at several sessions, including the Like Minds one on brand communications is that we're still just in the early stages of what the internet will bring us and how it will change our world. And I think that's accurate. The more I step back from my particular bubble world of journalism, the more I see how profoundly online communications and data pools are changing all sorts of industries. You'd better get used to change, because there's plenty of it still to come.

2. Practical advice is thin on the ground

There were some genuine social media superstars talking at events during Social Media Week London. But I'm amazed by the number of people popping up on panels with only a couple of years' experience (and the degree to which they overlap with the people I talked about in the last point…). They're able to talk in a limited way about an equally limited subset of situations. They're much more comfortable talking theory than they are hard, practical experience. And many people attending these panels want to leave having learnt something they can apply directly. There was much disgruntlement at the night-time drinkies during social media week (and in coffee meetings afterwards) and the value of the content in many of the events.

3. Beware the noise

There was an interesting comment at the Like Minds event about events: "all you need is someone with an iPhone and a brain…" And that might be true now. But it won't be true for much longer. As social platforms grow, it gets harder and harder to attract attention - look at how hard it is to build an audience for a new launch on a mature social platform like blogging, for example. The more people creating content live at events, the more you need skilled practitioners to help cut through the noise and achieve the amplification you're looking for. It's easy to get attention when few people are doing something. It's so much harder when everyone's doing it. The bandwagon feels great, when there's five of you on it. It's a bit less fun when there's five hundred.

4. There's lots of work left to do on curation

I don't think anybody has really solved the problem of linking together related content on a topic. We've been trying since the days of Trackbacks and Pingbacks, which have all but vanished thanks to the sterling efforts of the spammers (thanks, guys). But the idea of a cycle of buzz-building before something occurs, live-coverage as it occurs, followed by curation of that live coverage through to analysis and discussion is compelling, and useful from everything from the events business to news coverage. And the tools for curation still feel like the weak spot to me.

5. Events are the new media

There's plenty of evidence that we're moving towards a world where online and print media are ways of connecting and maintaining the relationships deepened and developed at face-to-face events. For all traditional media's sneering comments about "virtual friends", online communities seem more keen on meeting face to face than pretty much any other form of community, expect possibly swingers. Tweetups, unconferences, theme weeks, blogmeets (remember them?) et al have been a consistent theme throughout the grown of online media.

I'd add the following thoughts:

1. This is just the beginning. And as Bill Gates said about the Internet in the late 1990's, the changes are less than you will expect in the next 2 years, but far greater in the next 10.

2. Practical Advice is thin on the ground - so make sure the people advising you are practical There are people in this space who have been doing it for several years, but we are now in the phase where they are being drowned out by...

3. Beware the noise.....Snake Oil Y'all

4. Lots of Work on Curation - I agree, and more - the Aggregation stage is is where the value is created at the middle game of any new media value chain (see Social Media Value Chain diagram above). There will also be a major push to unify the many different Screen experiences, and then open walled garden Social Graphs (the Next Netscape). A very interesting development is the drive to Social Net Commerce (eg Facebook's new moves for mobile)

5. Events are the new media - very interesting perception. It is well known that in the first phase of the Hype Curve more money is made from talking about something than doing it, but I think Adam has hit a truism here - from the very beginning of the the 'Net, increasing online communication has also increased the desire of people (and I'm not just talking about the swingers) to meet face to face.